Sand Harbour
Sand Harbour is a rapidly-growing city on the shore of Castanola Bay in Topascoa. Warm sunshine permeates every corner of the city, while sea breezes blowing in from the Great Ocean ensure that the weather remains pleasant year round. Palm trees line the boulevards, lending an air of the exotic to the shops and homes, and bountiful orange groves stretch as far as the eye can see. Tourists flock to the beaches in droves, and a lucky few catch glimpses of the stars of the kinematograph... or even get "discovered" and put on the silver screen themselves. Sand Harbour contains the heart of the world's kinematography industry, and every major studio has offices and production facilities in the city. Red carpet premieres are a weekly occurrence at its celebrated kinematic palaces. Saldonia has a bottomless appetite for kinematographs, from screwball comedies to science fiction epics. It lionizes its favorite stars, making larger-than-life heroes out of two-bit hacks and glamorous leading ladies out of truck stop waitresses. The moguls who control the studios exercise as much power as any politician, and box office figures determine the pecking order amongst cinema’s elite. The lure of fame draws thousands to Sand Harbour every year, hoping to strike it rich amid the glitz and glamour. That's the fantasy they sell. The reality is a different story. The city's dream factories have a high price of admission, and chew up countless aspiring actors for every bona fide star they produce. Those cast aside have a difficult time of it. The lucky ones find work elsewhere; waiting tables, farming the orange groves, or quiet desk jobs in the city’s subsidiary businesses. The rest fall prey to the human vultures who hide behind the bright spotlights. Pornography and prostitution run rampant in the city's seamy red-light district, feeding on desperate "actors" with nowhere else to go. The rare few who succeed in the business find the spotlight uncomfortably brief. Fame can fade as quickly as it blooms, creating instant celebrities who slide into obscurity after a few short months. Sand Harbour's elite—the luckiest stars, the studio moguls, and their hangers-on—lead lives of bacchanalian excess in their Tarley Canyon mansions. A thriving tabloid industry collects the juiciest tidbits, printing them for a public eager to tear down the gods they have built. The police patrol the wealthiest neighborhoods like armed guards, providing unparalleled protection for those who can afford it. In contrast, the poor neighborhoods receive little police protection: cops only appear there when searching for a suspect. The ephemeral nature of its primary industry translates to the rest of Sand Harbour as well. The city is really more mirage than reality. It was built in the desert, fabricated from nothingness into a self-promoted oasis. A huge aqueduct, constructed just a decade back, provides ample water for the entire region (at the expense of the farming communities further inland), ensuring that gardens flourish where once there was only sand. The phoniness creates a culture of facades: garish alchemical lights and plaster rather than any real structure. First impressions are everything, and style supplants substance on every corner. As one denizen put it, "Other cities have a real backbone beneath their streets. Sand Harbour is just one big empty." That emptiness defines the city at its core. The lack of culture becomes a culture all its own, reveling in the latest, the flashiest, and the new. People can reinvent themselves every day, and the promise of a fresh start lingers on every street corner. Sand Harbour's smartest citizens quietly revel in their city's phony charm while refusing to believe a word of it. It's not hard to get the hang of it. After all, the sunsets are nice, the people are pretty, and the ocean has a way of washing your sins clean. The rest of the town—the ones who believe the lies—are eaten alive. Their bodies disappear beneath the sun and the sand, replaced by the next load of dreamers fresh off the bus. Neighborhoods Sand Harbour has no centralized locale—no core to form a beating heart. It's a mad tangle of neighborhoods, suburbs, and mini-communities, spreading out from the sea with little rhyme or reason. The studio hegemony rules from Tarley Canyon to the west, slowly giving way to middle- and working-class neighborhoods the further east one travels. Outlying farms crowd around the edges, gradually being pushed into the desert by expanding construction. It's a kaleidoscope of the new and the different, its only defining identity being the lack of an identity at all. * Tarley Canyon * Silver Lake * Eastside * Mission Flats * Beachfront Category:Locations Category:Locations in Topascoa Category:Locations in Saldonia Category:Small Cities Category:Settlements Category:Settlements in Saldonia